Previous jobs: Attorney. Newark city councilman from 1998 to 2002. Mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013.

Who is Cory Booker’s direct competition for the nomination?

Based on a recurring series of national surveys we conduct, we can figure out who the other candidates competing in Cory Booker’s lane are, and who the broader opponents are within the party.

The average Booker-satisfied respondent said they were satisfied with 5.5 other candidates, which is pretty high: it means that people who like him tend to be considering several other choices. To stay competitive, he’ll want to be in line with the top candidates in the race, for whom that number is less than 4. Just 2 percent of his supporters liked him and him alone.

Of those who said they’d be satisfied with Booker as nominee, over 70% would also be satisfied with Biden as nominee. That’s really high, roughly 10 percentage points higher than Biden’s satisfaction rate among general Democrats. Biden’s candidacy is a serious threat to Booker’s ability to maintain a constituency.

source

Business Insider

Two thirds of respondents content with Booker as nominee would also be satisfied with Sen. Kamala Harris as nominee. That satisfaction rate is roughly 15 percentage points higher than Harris’ satisfaction among Democrats overall.

A majority of those satisfied with Booker would also be satisfied with the nomination of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke or Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Among Booker fans, O’Rourke outperforms his satisfaction rate among Democrats generally by about 8 percentage points, and Warren by over 10 percentage points.

The takeaway is that Booker has considerable overlap with serious contenders, and this could go well – people identify him as a consensus candidate – or it could go disastrously: his potential support is divided among rivals.

INSIDER has been conducting a recurring poll through SurveyMonkey Audience on a national sample to find out how different candidate’s constituencies overlap. We ask people whether they are familiar with a candidate, whether they would be satisfied or unsatisfied with that candidate as nominee, and sometimes we also ask whether they think that person would win or lose in a general election against President Donald Trump.

He supports the Obama-era “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program, which protects from deportation young undocumented people who came to the US as children.

In July 2018, Booker was among a group of Senate Democrats who introduced the Keep Families Together Act, which aimed at keeping immigrant families together and preventing Homeland Security from separating children from their parents at the border.

Booker has been a vocal opponent of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, describing them as “abhorrent” and standing in “stark contrast to America’s most fundamental ideals.”

On climate change:

Booker supports the Green New Deal, a radical road map of future legislation to transition the US to 100% clean and renewable energy within a decade, in concert with federal investments in clean-energy jobs.

“The hard truth is climate change has imperiled our planet – it’s going to take bold action now to save it including dramatic investment in green energy that will create the jobs of the future. We can do this,” Booker said in February.

“My election will be run and powered by the people. That’s why we’re not taking corporate money, federal lobbyist money, pharma executive money,” Booker said in February.

Nearly 68% of Booker’s campaign funding between 2013 and 2018 came from large individual contributions of more than $200, according to OpenSecrets, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. Almost 10% has come from corporate PACs.

Early on in his career as a senator, Booker co-sponsored the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which barred workplace discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Booker has been highly critical of Trump’s ban on transgender people from serving in the military. “Mr. President, trans military members have sacrificed far more than you ever have – or will,” Booker said in a July 2017 statement.

Booker co-sponsored the Debt Free College Act, which was reintroduced in March, that aims to provide states incentives via matching grants to increase investments in public higher education and provide students with debt-free college. The bill aims to address the student loan crisis, which Booker says “punishes” young people for “seeking an education.”

Booker’s position on eliminating the Senate filibuster is unclear. He’s expressed concern over removing it, stating that GOP leadership “would have hurt people in my community” if the filibuster didn’t exist.

Booker has not outright supported expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, but did say, “I think I would like to start exploring a lot of options and we should have a national conversation. Term limits for Supreme Court justices might be one thing.”

Booker is in favor of universal background checks and sponsored the Assault Weapons Ban of 2017, legislation to ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

“Gun violence is an epidemic in this country – we have a responsibility to take this seriously and pass legislation that will curb the violence and take care of survivors and their families,” Booker said in a tweet in late March.

Booker pushed for immediate action to reduce gun violence after the August mass shootings in Texas and Ohio at the September Democratic debate. “I’m happy that people like Beto O’Rourke are showing such courage now and coming forward … but this is – what I’m sorry about, I’m sorry that it had to take issues coming to my neighborhood or personally affecting Beto to suddenly make us demand change,” Booker said.

On criminal justice reform:

Booker is perhaps best known for his work on criminal justice reform.

Booker won a big legislative victory in 2018 with the passage of the First Step Act, which he initially sponsored back in 2015, a bill that aims to reduce mass incarceration at the federal level. Trump signed it into law.

The senator followed up the success of the First Step Act by introducing the Next Step Act in early March, which he said pushes for “bolder, more progressive criminal justice reform.” The expansive bill aims to reduce mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses and reduce recidivism, among other goals.

Booker supports enfranchising people with felony records, stating that laws that bar former prisoners from voting are “a way, I think, that poor people especially – low-income people are being stripped of their democratic power.”

Booker voted in favor of a $716 billion defense budget for 2019 – one of the biggest defense budgets in modern US history.

The New Jersey senator called for repairing relationships with key international allies and blasted Trump’s coziness with authoritarian leaders at the September Democratic debate. “We cannot go up against China alone. This is a president that has a better relationship with dictators like Duterte and Putin than he does with Merkel and Macron,” Booker said.

On taxes:

Booker has not as of yet offered explicit economic plans regarding taxes as part of his 2020 campaign.

The senator does have a “baby bonds” plan to address wealth inequality, however, which would annually grant every native-born child in the US a set amount of money.

“It would be a dramatic change in our country to have low-income people break out of generational poverty,” Booker said of the “baby bonds” plan in an interview with Vox. “We could rapidly bring security into those families’ lives, and that is really exciting to me.”

Booker in April unveiled a proposal to cut taxes for more than 150 million Americans. The “Rise Credit” plan would expand the earned income tax credit, which benefits low and middle-income workers.

Booker is a national figure when it comes to criminal justice reform, and was instrumental garnering bipartisan support behind legislation aimed at reducing mass incarceration that was signed into law by President Donald Trump last year.

How much money has Cory Booker raised?

Booker’s campaign said it raised $5 million over the course of February and March, and over $6.1 million in cash on hand.

Could Cory Booker beat President Trump?

Referring back to INSIDER’s recurring poll, Cory Booker overall is believed to be a fairly ordinary candidate in a general election against Donald Trump compared to the whole field. Booker is essentially right on the money when it comes to his perceived perform acne against Trump compared to the general Democratic average.

How do Democratic voters feel about Cory Booker’s qualifications?

INSIDER has conducted polling about how voters feel about candidate attributes or qualifications. We asked respondents about a list of possible qualifications and if they made them more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate for president.

For example, among respondents who said they’d vote in the Democratic primary, 19% said a candidate being a college professor made them likelier to support them, while 4% said it made them less likely to, for a +15% net favorability. We can then see how different candidates’ resumes stack up compared to those preferences.

Attributes perceived as most valuable include his released tax returns (+43%), position in the Senate (+40%), past as an activist (+28%), that he is multi-lingual (+25%), age 50 or younger (+23%), a Rhodes scholar (+12%) with an Ivy league education (+7%) and a lawyer (+3%).

Attributes considered to be a liability based on the preferences of self-reported Democratic voters include that he grew up wealthy (-42%).